Determining the relationship between people can be useful. For example, people that eat at a particular restaurant may have friends with similar tastes. Accordingly, the restaurant's owners may wish to send advertisements to friends of the people that are regular patrons. However, determining the identities and contact information of people that are friends of regular patrons is very difficult. Furthermore, the restaurant's owner may wish to be more selective. For example, instead of sending an advertisement to all the friends of a regular patron, the restaurant owners may want to send an advertisement to just the friends that live or work in the same area as the regular patron.
Collecting contact information is also difficult. Users, such as restaurant patrons, are unlikely to visit a business and provide the contact information of their friends, family, and colleagues. Accordingly, businesses may look to other sources, such as social networking websites, for this data. However, social networking websites are unlikely to have, or allow a business to have access to, the data.
Social networks store data indicating which users are related to each other based on information volunteered by the users. For example, a social networking website may provide an interface to users to specify who their family, friends, classmates, or coworkers are on the social networking website. The social networking website may provide an interface for users to upload the contacts stored on their phones. Those contacts include names, phone numbers, or email addresses, without any data indicating how the contacts are related to any particular user. Accordingly, the social network website may request, through a web or mobile app, how the user is related to one or more of the contacts the user uploaded. Alternatively, a social networking website may determine relationships between users by extracting data from documents. For example, a social networking website may provide an interface for users to submit a resume or curriculum vitae (“CV”). The social networking website can determine where a user has worked by parsing the resume or CV and ask whether the user knows one or more other users that claim to have worked at the same one or more places.
The drawback of the approaches listed above is that users must voluntarily provide personal information about themselves and others to the social networking website. Users are often reluctant to provide that data. Even when users provide some data, some users may hold back data they do not want to be publicly known. However, when users fail to provide their personal information, then the usefulness of the social networking website is limited. Accordingly, even if businesses, or business owners, could have access to the data stored in a social network, the data would be incomplete.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
While each of the drawing figures illustrates a particular embodiment for purposes of illustrating a clear example, other embodiments may omit, add to, reorder, and/or modify any of the elements shown in the drawing figures. For purposes of illustrating clear examples, one or more figures may be described with reference to one or more other figures, but using the particular arrangement illustrated in the one or more other figures is not required in other embodiments.